Eric Bana on exorcisms: ‘There’s no actor alive who could do what I saw’

Eric Bana is Hollywood’s ‘quiet’ Australian. For starters, he doesn’t even live in La La Land: he still resides in the city he was born in, Melbourne, 46 years ago (‘It just means a lot of time on a plane,’ he shrugs), lives a conventional family life (publicist wife, two kids), and generally avoids the headlines.

But none of that has affected his acting career: he has starred in blockbusters, romances, serious dramas and now he’s adding the horror genre to his CV with Deliver Us From Evil, the latest from Sinister director Scott Derrickson.

The film is the true story about NYPD police officer Ralph Sarchie, who found himself investigating a series of inexplicable crimes that seemed beyond human and certainly supernatural.

With co-star Joel McHale in a scene from the spooky new flick (Picture: AP Photo/Sony Pictures)

Deliver Us From Evil helped Bana put aside his horror scepticism ‘because I understood that this was a human story set in a somewhat supernatural world. And the film itself has a kind of sceptical way of viewing the material.

‘It’s not exclusively for people who believe in this sort of stuff – and there are a lot of exit doors for people who don’t.’

He smiles, sort of. ‘But you are still going to be scared.’

Bana was certainly scared during filming – mainly when Derrickson showed him footage that Sarchie had, of supposed exorcisms.

‘I was a little bit p***ed off because, at one point, he put this particular piece of material in front of us and it just happened so quick. I was watching something that I didn’t really want to watch and that really, really affected me.

‘I knew I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of my head.’ He laughs, slightly bitterly. ‘It was a bit like: “Okay, I can’t just un-see what I just saw.”’

More brooding with Edgar Ramirez (Picture: AP Photo/Sony Pictures)

And it wasn’t faked? ‘There’s no actor alive who could do what I saw happening to someone,’ he says.

‘And I have no way of explaining what that person was going through, or why, and for privacy reasons, I can’t talk about what I saw. But it was enough to give me a very uncomfortable week. But it was important that I saw it for what we were doing.’

‘I’ve been re-educated on horror through my son Klaus,’ says the hulking, attractive Bana, who admits he wasn’t much of a fan of the genre before.

‘He’s genuinely interested in it from a historical perspective. He was on the set because we were shooting during the school holidays and it was really cool for him to hear me talk to the director about the subject matter. It was a bit of an eye-opener for me.’

‘You will be scared’ Bana promises of his new movie (Picture: AP Photo/Sony Pictures)

Deliver Us From Evil may have delivered a jolt to Bana’s system, then, but he does generally believe in the otherworldly. ‘I think there’s no doubt that a lot of it is about what frequency you choose to tune into,’ he says.

‘The question is, does the frequency choose you or do you choose the frequency? I think some people are more attuned to living on that frequency than others, whether that’s a conscious choice or not.

‘And if you have ever been really, really scared, if you’ve sensed something that has made you feel very uncomfortable or had a few hours where you felt like someone is over your shoulder, I think that could be an example of choosing to tune into that frequency.’